“Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not” —Protagoras

I am a postdoctoral visitor at the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, working with Prof. Naftali Tishby. I will be joining Prof. Daniel D. Lee's group in the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania.

I did my PhD in Autonomous Agents under the supervision of Zoubin Ghahramani at the University of Cambridge and my BSc/Diploma in Computer Engineering at the University of Chile. My background is mainly in Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science.

I'm interested in the foundations of Machine Learning and Cybernetics, and I study the links between: information theory, learning, control, economics, causality, statistical mechanics, ergodic theory and complexity theory. Most importantly, I'm a huge fan of elegant, minimalistic algorithms that are practically simple, computationally efficient, and formally sound.

I have recently focused my efforts on information-theoretic and statistical mechanical approaches to adaptive control, leading to contributions in bounded rationality models and recasting adaptive control as a causal inference problem. I have also worked on causal induction, and on game- and decision-theoretic models in computational neuroscience.

Also, there is more information in

• my PhD thesis on bounded rationality and Bayesian control,
• and my publications.

• Thermodynamics as a Theory of Bounded Rational Decision-Making on Videolectures
• A Bayesian Rule for Adaptive Control at AGI (unfortunately not synchronized with the slides)
• IS Colloquium
• Bayesian Causal Induction
• Bayesian Control Rule
• Arg-Max Prior

• 6th May 2013: I'm giving the talk “Information-Theoretic Bounded Rationality” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
• 2nd May 2013: I'm giving the talk “Adaptive Coding of Actions and Observations” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
• 18 March 2013: I have started a 3-months academic visit at the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation in Jerusalem, under the supervision of Prof. Naftali Tishby.
• 8 February 2013: I gave the talk “Adaptive Coding of Actions and Observations” at GRASP (UPenn).
• 16 January 2013: I gave the talk “Adaptive Coding of Actions and Observations” at Gatsby.
• 11 December 2012: I gave the talk “Adaptive Coding of Actions and Observations” at the NIPS 2012 Workshop on Information in Perception and Action.
• 12-16 September 2012: I gave a talk at the Workshop on the statistical physics of inference and control theory, Granada 2012.
• 3 September 2012: Our paper “A Nonparametric Conjugate Prior Distribution for the Maximizing Argument of a Noisy Function” got accepted at NIPS 2012.
• 11 June 2012: I'm a speaker and chair at the Max Planck - Chile Research Seminar.
• 11 June 2012: I'm going to give a short talk at the European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning 2012.
• 17 December 2011: The talk “Bayesian Causal Induction” can be found here.
• more...

Pedro A. Ortega (פדרו אורטגה)
Givrat Ram, Ross Building, Room 1E
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem
Israel

Email: peortega [AT] cs.huji.ac.il

Phone: +972-2-658-6061